Contributors

David Sanders

May 09, 2008

So what exactly happened here? Was it the 'monster first, script second' dynamic, which, if I were feeling especially cruel, I might cite the viewing figures as possible proof? Was it a Helen Raynor hangover? Or is it, as Neil is all but screaming from the rafters and not without justification, just me?

Well, let's review what we learned in this episode. For openers, demanding that an army which values death before personal dishonour goes home with their metaphorical tails between their legs is categorically not in any way a good idea. With two decades separating The Poison Sky from The Two Doctors(which most well-meaning fans and Tat Wood try their hardest to forget), it's absolutely proper for the episode to demonstrate to the newer audience that Sontarans practice what they preach and what their response would be. So that's one-nil to Neil. But not for the first time in a Helen Raynor two-parter is the Tenth Doctor made to look, at the very least, a naive fool.

This is different from The Parting Of The Ways, where pressing the plunger would have taken out not only himself, the satellite and the Daleks, but everyone on the planet below, and the Ninth Doctor couldn't bring himself to do it. Here, the only sacrifice that would be made besides the Sontarans is himself, and the Earth will be destroyed if he doesn't. And this Doctor can topple governments from the sidelines, he can wipe out a species in the name of justice with the flick of a switch, but when he has to look into the face of his opponent, suddenly he can't pull the trigger; and while it wasn't the intention, the scene goes on for so long and times it so close to the wire that it doesn't half look like he's stalling for time until the inevitable beamed-in redemption that takes his place. Couldn't they have made him show a little remorse or surprise, or at least ask what happened when he comes back out?

The Sontaran way is normally to barge in like you own the place, then pound away at it until you do

I'm not letting the potato-heads off the hook that easily either, because there's an awful lot of boondoggle to the Sontaran plan. Surely there must be quicker and easier ways to gas a planet? The Doctor would think so too, since he knows as well as we do that the Sontaran way is normally to barge in like you own the place, then pound away at it until you do - and if the Sontarans had simply turned up and declared war on the Earth, let the humans launch their nukes to no effect, and then bombarded them up with gas grenades until they choked while mopping up the resistance, they'd have won by a mile. No plonkering about waiting for ATMOS to do its job really slowly while hoping nobody lights a fag in the meantime. And no need in your gameplan either for a duplicitous pissed-off agent who might conceivably use his genius and your own technology to bite you in the ass once the jig is up. Risk assessment ought to have seen that one coming. Have we got to the point now where RTD and his writing team have upped the whammo stakes in the alien invasion plot so many times, that new invasions have to be written with built-in catastrophic flaws in order for the human race to stand any chance of winning? It sure looks that way.

And I'm sorry, but there's no getting around it: the science on display is miserable. It's not like Evolution Of The Daleks, where Helen Raynor was making up stuff on the top of her head; rather, it's logic and reason being sacrificed on the altar of boffo CGI effects, and not really 'science' per se. Possibly I've been traumatised reviewing the six-part snoozeathon that was The Seeds of Death, as it's exactly the same kind of credibility gap that that one had, only more expensive. Let's say that you have got a gas dense enough to need a Valiant-sized jet engine to blow it away, that accumulates at skyscraper level instead of on the ground and burns without incinerating anyone that's breathing the stuff in. There's still the small matter of the 70 percent of the Earth's surface covered by water - you know, the bit with no cars in it - which is kind of crucial if the Doctor hopes to get rid of it all in one go in a massively cool-looking way. I can accept one or the other, but not both.

OK, I'll come right out and say it: who else, after the Valiant appeared, couldn't help thinking of the giant robot maid from Spaceballs, coming to vacuum the entire atmosphere up?

Shall we try a compromise? The Poison Sky is season four's equivalent, so far, of a Micheal Bay blockbuster. But just because an episode is a massive crowd-pleaser, doesn't mean it's all that great or memorable when you come to watch it again. There's a lot of great setpieces and character moments; Rattigan's petulant temper tantrum perfectly underscores how pathetic and impotent he really is, and the UNIT/Doctor relation, where neither of them are fully in the right or the wrong, would have been unthinkable under Barry Letts stewardship. But in spite of all the old-style UNIT and Sontaran trappings, its classic-Who heart very much belongs in the JN-T gaudiness of the 80s, in the same way that Earthshock and Resurrection Of The Daleks absolutely bowled me over when I was twelve. We've been down this road many times already in the last few years; it looks like the regular folks have better things to do on an early Saturday evening and the earlier timeslot has more work to do to keep everyone interested. All eyes are certainly going to be the upcoming viewing figures for this Saturday, when the show has a go at something different and surprising again - stuff the sprog, this'll be the episode that gives birth to a million slash fics. Brrrrr.

May 03, 2008

There's a particular brand of Nintendo Logic, prevalent in crappy old 8-bit adventure games, where the Great Hero has to navigate a pathway; you can see where it leads, there's plenty of room to walk around, but you can't proceed until you've solved a puzzle because - oh noes! - there's a stick in your way. Back in the old multi-parter years you could forgive the odd slip with McCoy and his brolly. You grumbled a bit, but grudgingly put up with Colin Baker looking stern-faced eight times out of fourteen. These days we get three cliffhangers a season, tops, if we're lucky. So what on earth is Helen Raynor playing at, building a whole cliffhanger around the same Nintendo Logic principle? "Doctor, help! I'm trapped in a life-threatening situation involving a locked door!"

Imagine how this could have turned out in the hands of Eric Saward in 1984

Sometime since Shakedown, somebody's finally decided to update the Sontaran military handbook so that rule one now reads 'Think Big'. They've never been much for each other's Play-Doh headed company before now, but if you've got a army that churns out hundreds of millions on a conveyer belt, then you'd bloody better use them because a couple of B-list grunts in a golf ball simply doesn't cut it anymore. Why they've set their sights now on Earth instead of Ruta III is no mystery either, if all they've got to show for centuries of conflict with their frigid foes is the ultimate in gazpacho-soup biotechnology. A quick stopover in Paris instead of Seville or New Orleans and they'd at least have some croûtons to go with it.

I'll give the Sontaran strategists this much; they've got taste. The entirety of Earth's radio signals and broadcast transmissions to sift through for vital intelligence, and they zero straight in on their favourite episodes of Columbo. Which is why, two decades after the dregs of the JN-T era when they could have feasibly enlisted a disgruntled Clive Sinclair with the lure of a rampack that doesn't crash when it wobbles (while tactfully neglecting to tell him who's actually been making the BBC Micros to generate those not-so-special effects with), their Earth agent is Alex Brady, the wacko Spielbergish film director from Murder, Smoke And Shadows. Look, it's definitely him - same twisted genius, same cocksure arrogance, same twangy annoying Yankishness. He leaves a Columbo-style paper trail of clues too, since if the factory staff are all under hypnosis, there's no reason to even have a sick-day folder except for interfering busybodies like Donna to find. What, precisely, does our kid believe he's going to get out of all this? "It was never big enough for me." No, well I imagine there wouldn't be much of the Earth left after raping the resources to make 800 million shiny new needlessly-overcomplicated deathmobiles with, not after the Adipose, the Slitheen and those Bane idiots with their genetically-modified Fanta have already had their go.

Hence priority A2 in the UNIT Field Operatives Manual, underneath 'find the cackling woofter in the goatee', is 'investigate faceless corporations staffed by zombies that get rich overnight'. Look, there's another one. The statute's been in place since the 1970s, and compared to this lot, even Global Chemicals and their fruity Wagnerian Vic-20 would slip under the Cardiff radar. Tell the guy in charge of painting UNIT's 'top secret signs', he'll soon get the word out. But those 52 spontaneous deaths? Not to worry, it's only what's left of the Ian Levine forum having a collective aneurysm at the great Orobouros monster that is the UNIT dating controversy continuing to swallow its own tail. So nothing suspicious there.

Hmmm... clone army, high technology, the unearthly knack of flogging tarted-up shit to gullible proles worldwide... has anyone got George Lucas handy on the phone?

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if Robert Holmes, who created the buggers, couldn't construct a workable original plot out of a shopping list of elements and some bizarre location footage, then poor old Helen Raynor still hasn't got a mission. I was expecting just a load of derivative crap, but at least she has a crack script editor and research team on hand this season to ensure that both UNIT and the Sontarans are handled spot-on, and that her script presses everyone's continuity buttons the right way. Imagine how this could have turned out in the hands of Uncle Tewwance in 1973 or (God forbid) Eric Saward in 1984. As is becoming the norm for this season, the companion and support cast effortlessly carry it all off through honest, down-to-Earth humanity, and look! Hard-edged Martha gets to be a more proactive catalyst - she gets others to react, though her own delivery hasn't gone down so well this week across the blog - than her entire time at Torchwood. As a result it's all huge, jolly and yes, touching fun right up until it goes completely mental at the end, as the Sontaran wave in the terraces chants and throws toilet rolls on the pitch at the halftime score of Killer Cars 400 million, humans nil.

April 10, 2008

"Fat just walks away".Bet those greasy carpet stainsAre a bitch to shift.

Doctor Who: Partners In Crime

That can't be the real Catherine Tate, she's got something nice to say about someone.

But that gap year has done Donna the power of good. Less shouty and abrasive, showing her own initiative, and more open to the wonders of the universe (ie., open-mouthed goggling at it). Well, except for the Titanic on Christmas Day, which was clearly just a bad effects shot in a studio. Stuff the moon landings. But if the Doctor hadn't thrown away the sonic pen (and what's the betting we'll see some future consequences of casually discarding that kind of technology on a level five planet), Donna would be showing all the hallmarks of maturing from this generation's Duggan into a more excitable Sarah Jane Smith.

"Wot, Sarah Jane Smith? You're having a larf"

No, seriously. I shouldn't need to remind everyone how Elisabeth Sladen viewed her time in the TARDIS with Tom Baker as two childhood best friends. Now that she's nudging this side of 40, assuming you don't count guest-star reappearances or Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, this makes Catherine Tate the oldest TV companion since the days of Ian and Barbara, the last time the original TARDIS co-stars were purposefully conceived to each represent a different particular family audience identification figure. And since there's no romantic attachment promised this year, as she settles down, Donna might just grow into the 'every person' role more naturally than either of her two predecessors did; the viewing figures give every encouraging sign of this bearing fruit. But more that that, Donna shows more enthusiasm and gusto at the prospect of a trip into the wild blue yonder than we've had since the show rose from the ashes in 2005. It's the same gusto we're all sharing at home, because we're just so gosh-darned pleased to see the Doctor too. Well, some of us anyway.

But perhaps the biggest compliment one could pay to this year's opener concerns neither of the two leads at all. And though the whole world and John Leeson's dog knew already before Saturday that Billie Piper was due for a comeback, the episode had held me so captivated that even with that oh-so-recognisable blonde head right there in front of me to whom Donna was wittering about her mother's car keys (oh God, she's got MY MOTHER), it was a total shock when Rose then turned around and that theme started playing. Which meant that Partners In Crime had done its job admirably. The first thought that sprang to mind was that I never have imagined we'd catch a haunting glimpse of Rose this early in the year. Then she walked away and faded from view, and the second thing was, "Hmm, well I hope Mrs Noble brings a wire coathanger then."

RTD, for better or worse, writes the kind of stories he wants to see on the screen. Well, duh. But if his podcast commentaries have taught the armchair critics anything, it's to watch out for the occasions when, as showrunner, Russell is too close to his own work that he appears to lose sight of his own strengths and weaknesses as a writer. When Russell concentrates on characters above all else, he invariably by this point comes up with a winner; when he blows it, it's when his world-building big-picture judgement gets swamped by an obvious love of Grand Guignol and blockbuster spectacle. The season premiers, with their own mandate to introduce new characters or relationships and put forward a rattling good yarn to showcase them in, are his compromise episodes, and at this his track record is pretty good, with only New Earth completely falling to bits. There are those who say it doesn't matter if the year gets off to a wobbly start, so long as the season as a whole stays consistent and the high points ensure the lows are quickly forgotten. But that's only true provided the media's love affair with the show (and by extension the public's) keeps going, which the show is having to work harder and harder to prolong. It's another good reason for the year off; once the show is relegated in the complacent public consciousness to just a regular television staple rather than a special event, that duff first episode will be the surest sign to everyone that the programme has lost its sparkle. John Nathan-Turner might have had something to say about that too around 1985, when the parody sketch suddenly got its second wind. Like the Royal Family to Spitting Image, the cheap gaudiness and corridor-running was no longer the sacred cow it once was.

"Bernard Cribbins compounds his pissed-up comedy tramp image by not having shaved or changed clothes since Christmas"

End Of Part One would have had a field day with some of this plot though. It doesn't take Noam Chomsky to figure out that the only problem with the alien breeding plan is the total imbecile in charge of it. Why make your modus operandi and establishment reek of industrial skulldiggery when nothing required of you for success needs to be in any way morally reprehensible? Humans want to lose weight, you want the waste by-product, and everyone's happy. Sorted. But why draw attention to what you're doing with a process that causes inexplicable weird shit to happen in the middle of the night, which only the gullible or desperate would play along with? Instead of looking all secretive and shifty hiding behind some silly, too-good-to-be-true diet pill as your cover story, what's wrong with a chain of liposuction clinics? If they'd thought about this for more than ten seconds, they could have had a completely innocent and dynamic new - 'scuse the term - growth industry on their hands. And yes, that quaint Anglocentric-ness has always been part and parcel of Doctor Who, but what are they doing pissing about here instead of the most statistically obese nation in the world across the Atlantic Ocean, with four times the population of Britain? Because I'm not at all confident, and it certainly didn't seem apparent on screen, that there's as many as a million fat bastards in the whole of London. Even their business model is rubbish since the 'free' 18-carat pendant must cost more than the sale value of the capsules, for God's sake. And that fatty mass has to go somewhere; never mind the scientific journals, shedding a brick of it every night is bound to raise questions in the trashier wimmin's chat-and-diet mags, even if it were possible to burn a whole kilo of it in one day. Which it isn't. You see? They're just thick.

Still, no matter; I don't see media honeymoon going stale for a while yet, not while Bernard Cribbins compounds his pissed-up comedy tramp image by not having shaved or changed his clothes and hat since Christmas. Partners In Crime is just the tonic after being locked in the Hub for three months of the freakshow that is Welsh Big Brother, without the saving grace of being able to vote the miserable buggers out. I know how Neil feels at Torchwood's po-faced overseriousness, because I'm bloody tired at being prodded by the scripts to look for deeper meanings within each episode and being made to look like a lemon in front of the other bloggers if I don't happen to see it. So hooray for an adventure with a sense of righteous fun again. Moral ambiguities be damned - sometimes all you want is a universe painted in nice simple blacks and whites, though the world isn't at all like that and even the Doctor admits the punishment does not always fit the crime. It's quite refreshing not to have the Doctor dish out his own brand of retribution for a change and still walk away contented at a job well done, espeicially since at a score of around minus ten thousand, this has to be the lowest body count in the entire history of the show.

Doctor Who is a cosy, comforting sort of formula, even when Stephen Moffat or Paul Cornell are in the driving seat. So I'm leaving the South Bank Show wittering on the deeper meaning of humanity to Stu and Sean, who are that much better at it, and sticking to cheap jibes instead. You take that kind of scrutiny too far with Doctor Who, you run the risk of turning into Stephen James Walker. And believe me, even our fandom's not big enough for two of those.

March 21, 2008

Dishonest John twirlsHis moustache to the tune of"Bob Clampett cartoon".

Torchwood: From Out Of The Rain

In the Captain Scarlet episode 'Winged Assassin' (only the second episode broadcast, take note), the Mysterons replicate a large passenger jet, and send it barreling down the runway towards the plane of the foreign president whom Spectrum have been assigned to protect. There's no time to safely avert a collision between the two, so Captain Scarlet does the only thing he can; he attempts to drive the jet off the runway by rubbing his Pursuit Vehicle against the tyres, blowing out the undercarriage and causing the jet to overturn. He succeeds, but the effort also causes him to lose control of the SPV, costing him his life for the second time. Then, on taking off, the President's plane just about fails to gain enough height, clips the erect tail rudder of the downed jet, and plunges to the ground in a colossal explosion.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to properly script a catastrophic 'well, fuck' ending and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Not even Dick Cheney could pass that one off as a triumph.

When I was a kid, I didn't know dick about sartorial elegance (and still don't). My mother, in one of her more lucidly sociopathic trains of thought, would pick out her new clothes on the basis that if I didn't like them, they had to be good. You get kind of blase about this after thirty-eight years, so it's with nary a sigh and a shrug that I greet the stark fact of being the odd man out over From Out Of The Rain. Because I enjoyed it this week. Quit looking at me like that.

From Out Of The Rain is nearly brilliant. Nearly. You know the narrow borderline between madness and genius? That kind of 'nearly'. All the basic ingredients are in their own way sublime, they just happen to be hopelessly and utterly wrong. It's a slick Nigel Kneale ghost story - the problem is that nobody had the guts to tell PJ Hammond it wasn't supposed to be one, or drag him out of the videotape of the space-trap service station he's been stuck in since his own series folded in 1982. But nobody can say that Hammond isn't also a master of the high concept (albeit the same ones have worked for him dozens of times before); so either it's a gourmet souffle made with only the finest quality fish heads, or else unlike my esteemed colleagues, I lack the necessary background in Sapphire & Steel to see For Out Of The Rain for what it really is. It's hard to tell.

"A gourmet souffle made with only the finest quality fish heads"

What's much easier to get a handle on is that if you still expect Torchwood the series to resemble something approaching honest-to-God science fiction (and for heaven's sake, why would you be after blowfish in sports cars, undead angst and marital disunity?), it's a given that you're going to have really, really, really, really, really hated this one. To you, it's PJ Hammond waving his wrinkled nob and going 'Woooo! Spooky! Wooooooooooooooo!' in your face. The impeccable atmosphere, helped hugely by an evocative background mix of Brian Hodgson and Mark Snow, won't do a single thing for you if all you can see is a virtual retread of Small Worlds in style and structure, where absolutely nothing is properly explained or rationalised - great for Sapphire & Steel, not so hot for proper sequential drama. There's also no getting around that From Out Of The Rain is the living embodiment of the term 'spooky-do', almost all set-up with very little payoff. It even takes place in the site of an abandoned fairground, for Christ's sake. With a comedy chase scene. All it needs now is the maze of doors for everyone to run in and out of, while Catatonia belts out a bouncy bubblegum version of Mulder & Scully behind them. Meanwhile, in one the obvious script-edited bits which Hammond didn't write, Owen's mystical dead powers, which they could have done much more with as a plot device this week, are briefly and ineptly trucked out as an unsubtle boxing-glove reminder for viewers too addled by alcohol to remember seven days ago (and they'll have their work cut out for them now that the show has moved to Friday nights), and Tosh is given precious little to do again but stay home and stick virtual letter-shaped fridge magnets on her computer screen. Can you buy those on Second Life?

Jack's own existence as one of the two people still living who can remember the Night Travellers first hand also flatly contradicts the basic 'memories captured on film' premise of the episode. I've had all sorts of apologetic excuses for this thrown at me; that Jack was an infiltrating agent, he wasn't one of them, and wasn't even part of the same show since the film reel was a compilation of different footage (and let's throw that one under the bus right now; can you see Vorg and Shima from Carnival Of Monsters wanting to go anywhere near a man who blows his own brains out on an daily basis? Robert Holmes wasn't that morbid). I'm not buying a word of it, and if Hammond's script insists upon leaving the explanations up to the viewer, then it's got to expect this shit. What about all the parish records on the Travellers and newspaper clippings about the disappearances in their wake? Do these not count? The info-nerd phenomenon didn't start with the digital age, so are you also saying that nobody has ever kept a diary and written them down? Or taken photographs of the show? You know, on film? Besides, since the Travellers have been reduced to creatures of light and shadow, then why shouldn't they be able to step out of Jack's head?

In actual fact though, the biggest inspiration of all behind this episode may not be The Stone Tapes or PJ Hammond's own cult following, but Disney's Pinocchio, of which I won't be at all surprised if PJ turns out to have been traumatised by it as a child. I hereby cite the sideshow Italian named Stromboli as further proof. But even though I can expect a long wooden nose if I deny that I happened to like From Out Of The Rain, the only thing that's going to turn into a donkey is PJ Hammond's reputation if he tries anything like this again.

March 16, 2008

1. When out in the field hunting aliens in secret, be sure to wave your gun around everywhere you go. Nobody will ever pay attention.

2. Alien ova are transmitted via a bite on the wrist. They will then travel through the bloodstream to your uterus. This happens because they're alien.

3. The laws of conservation of mass and energy do not apply to shapeshifters. This happens because they're alien.

4. All aliens are in the employ of witches, specifically Flanella from Chorlton and the Wheelies, Grotbags from Emu's Pink Windmill, and her out of Harry Potter who likes to ban fun.

5. In the event of co-worker impregnation, holding them down and applying an anaesthetic should never ever be considered.

6. Should you yourself undergo alien infestation, be advised that pregnancy will turn your entire family by proxy into drooling vegetables. On no account let any reasoned argument postpone your wedding day; whatever your boyfriend has gone through in the past will be worse than how you going down the aisle having swallowed a basketball is going to make him look, or the sudden disappearance of said basketball the next day. If feeling particularly altruistic, place the guests in as much needless danger as humanly possible; this is supposed to be a day they'll never forget (see section 16).

7. The host pregantee acting as bait to draw out the alien intent on ripping her open should be left unguarded at all times.

8. Making the fruitiest male member of the team choose your wedding dress is mandatory and never gets old. For best results, find one that makes the bride look fat in it even after the egg is removed.

9. All call signs and code words should be disguised as Welsh innuendo.

10. Never tell your underlings what anyone else is doing without ample scope for comic misunderstanding.

11. The penis is the most edible part of the human body. (NB: pregnant persons may wish to skip this section.)

12. In the event of a brutal murder, on no account call the authorities or inform the hotel staff; their valuable time will be far too occupied with menial daily duties to be present.

13. Should you encounter anyone who appeared in the old series of Doctor Who, shoot them first at once (CF: every other section of the book).

14. If the handgun with a fifty-shot clip is already taken, bring along a Nintendo Superscope for backup.

15. Sensitive medical equipment does not need to be operated by trained medical personnel. This is helpful to know if your medical officer is a c**t.

16. If against the odds the big day turns out a success after all, remove the memories of the event from all the staff and guests, thus annulling the marriage because nobody present can verify it, so you can do it all over again.

17. You are not Ronnie Corbett, and No Sex Please, We're British is less funny now than when critics panned it in 1971.

18. Employing the same plot devices over and over again does not constitute a story arc.

19. When hiring Gary Russell as script editor, be sure to set aside enough money to keep him on for just two episodes before handing back to one of your trained monkeys.

20. In the event of a comission falling into the hands of the man who made New Captain Scarlet borderline ADHD-unwatchable, declare a state of emergency and break the glass canister containing a back issue of Viz. Distract him by cutting all the panels out and letting him rearrange them in any order. As an additional damage-limitation exercise, use this as your script.

March 07, 2008

John Lennon conceived the song A Day In The Life as the rambling, introverted monologue of a man so wrapped up in the day-to-day machinations of his own private universe, that he completely fails to pay due credence to the strange, exciting or newsworthy events in the world in front of him.

Torchwood got that point entirely right, because I saw the whole thing and didn't get it.

A Day In The Death is an awkward beast to have to review. It's not a standard Torchwood escapade by any means, so comparing it to the other episodes that way is a bit of a redundant exercise. But it's not really an episode you can adequately quantify as being 'good' or 'bad' on its own terms either. It looked nice enough (the camerawork was relatively stable this week) and there were no obvious flaws in the logic besides the manner of Owen's continued functioning (and if we start going there we'll be tied up all fucking month), but honestly, it's going to be each individual viewer that determines whether the TV-dinner messages on the meaning of life worked for them or not. And frankly, I'm not really sure how much moral nutrition was actually present. At least the bad episodes throw it straight at you as a condescending lecture. Maybe A Day In The Death was incredibly clever instead and I was just too obtuse to see it beyond the visual metaphor of Owen methodically disposing of all the perishables he no longer needed. Then I thought about it a bit more and went no, this is BBC2 on a Wednesday night straight after Masterchef. Bollocks to that.

What we got instead was essentially Random Shoes, in reverse, minus the heartwarming schadenfreude. Eugene, the inner geek within us all, was a hapless but lovable loser dragged down by the pricks around him. But dead or not, Owen has still got more professional competence in his little finger (the broken one) than I have in my whole body, and the arrogant swagger that goes with it; most of his colleagues genuinely, in a utterly futile gesture, want to help; even Ianto, once he's stopped being smug at how the tables are turned over the coffee. But after five minutes' worth of brave face, Owen does nothing to earn anyone's sympathy for damn near three quarters of an hour; he's trying to prove his worthiness to himself rather than the team, he couldn't give two shits about them except as workmates, and is ruthlessly determined to make everyone miserable for as long as possible. And Jack's not having any of it; it's not so much 'been there, done that', but 'too long, didn't read'.

Jack's not having any of Owen's self-pity; it's not so much 'been there, done that', but 'too long, didn't read'

I suppose I could make an effort to extrapolate some long-winded profundity on the human condition from all of the above and elaborate on it here. But I'm not going to. That bit in Neil's living room where Tosh is talking but the words aren't getting through to Owen's expressionless face? That was my face, that was. As he tangented into yet another meandering train of thought, there was I mulling over ways Owen could creatively obliterate himself for good while pissing off as many people as possible. Walking into a nuclear reactor going "Eldrad MUST live" is too simple. Going to a sci-fi convention and loudly referring to the creator of Star Trek as 'Gene Deadandburied' earns more points. Or attending every Babylon 5 screening at the same convention, then waving his arms about and shouting 'DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!' every time Bill Mumy appears on the screen.

Ramble, ramble, ramble...

OK look, it's like this. If A Day In The Death's point is that the key to enjoying life is in appreciating the friends you have and people you know, then it fails, because Owen was only brought back from the brink by this magic alien whistle and not by any human contact at all. Plus he's still a turd. If it's telling us to grow some balls and have some self-esteem, then it fails, because that was the note they finished on last week and it didn't take the bloody hypocrite more than two days of story time to settle into a thoroughly unlikeable blind frump. And though there are probably more unkind things to say to a genuine trauma victim on the verge of suicide, I'm buggered if I can think of one off the top of my head. If it was about embracing life and enjoying it to the full, then it fails, because Richard Briers had done all that and still ended up alone and terrified on his deathbed, his own legacy meaning absolutely diddly in the end. And if it was trying to say that there's a big wide wonderful universe out there, then it fails, because the Voyager probe was an advertisement alerting the Earth's presence to the cosmos at large, on behalf of the billions of lifeforms walking upon it. So what happens? The reply comes back, and without even bothering to find out what it is, gets stuck in the hands of one reclusive old bloke for years on end. Then Torchwood comes along, goes 'ta very much, we'll have that', and it gets locked away in their vault for ever and ever. Why are they the only ones allowed to have any fun?

And if you try to strip away any deeper meanings and just go with the idea of hope, then it still fails, because of the blunt way Owen had painted Richard Briers' own hope as the curse that was prolonging his misery and suffering, rendering in advance that big speech of his at the end a complete waste of everyone's time. It comes over more like how Maggie keeps trying to tell him all the way through; what good is a meaningless catch-all term like 'hope' anyway, if nothing concrete is there to substantiate it? And how many wibbly-wobbly alien Lite-Brites are going to fall into the average depressive's hands anyway?

The guard should have splattered his brains all over the stair carpet, that being the industry-standard method of executing a walking corpse

They don't show nearly enough George A Romero movies in Cardiff either. "I'm not giving off any body heat, and you know what that means." Yes, it means that since Owen's the dangerous intruder disobeying a direct challenge, the guard should have immediately splattered his brains all over the stair carpet, that being the industry-standard method of executing a walking corpse. The sod wouldn't be so cocksure about facing down an armed opponent then. It might not have the desired permanent effect, but it wouldn't be much fun for Owen after that and might even stop his whinging self-pity for more than five minutes.

By the way, were you aware that Dead Man Walking and A Day In The Death were the first two episodes to be script-edited by Gary Russell? Yes, it all makes perfect sense now, particularly if you've read Spiral Scratch and what he did to Mel.

March 04, 2008

Showen Of The Dead.Where's Nick Frost and Simon PeggWhen you need them most?

Torchwood: Dead Man Walking

We've got it all together for a brand new show,Owen Harper's undead and away we go!While Captain Jack is haunted by some past-life ghost,Martha's doing nothing 'cos she's aged the most!So come on get involved, till the plot holes are resolved,Hang around for spooky-do!

Well look, they can't kill him off for good without having to remaster the voiceover segment with him in it all over again, now can they? Even so, ninety seconds before the magic solution is pulled out of thin air has got to be some kind of world record. And off Jack goes with his one-legged cameraman to the derelict church in the middle of the night (because they can't simply park Owen in the cryogenic deep-freeze for a few hours until daylight when the place will be SAFER, the prannets. And why is it always St Mary's thingummybob in these kind of shows that attracts all the nutters anyway?). You don't actually see the animated George Harrison from Yellow Submarine singing 'tiptoe through the Weevils' during this bit, but we bet you will now that image is in your head.

You don't actually see the animated George Harrison from Yellow Submarine singing 'tiptoe through the Weevils' in the church, but we bet you will now that image is in your head

Being dead plays hell with your social life. Channeling Jon Pertwee's mirrorlon Inferno gurning while the voices in your head growl 'Mel Gibson' out loud is quite the party piece until they realise you're not putting it on. But before you know it you've timeslipped back to 1984 in the bar, and your whole sensory perception is of a swirly Duran Duran video gone horribly wrong as the pubgoers mindlessly incant 'Torville and Dean' over and over again in the background. So nothing different there then.

And now Owen Harper is Arnold J Rimmer, right down to the magnetic attraction towards every one-liner in the script. Goalpost Head, meet Crossbar Mouth. I said last week that simply writing him off or bringing him back a changed man would have utterly diminished the character beyond all credibility, so an appreciative nod is in order to the story planners for instead opting for the one legitimate solution that makes the scenario work, as overused as it is. Owen is placed in a position where it's impossible for him to enjoy his existence, all the power he's abused in the past has been totally stripped from him, and there's not a thing he can do except learn to lump it (and more than likely acquire a completely new set of powers along the way). No food, no sex (even Jack doesn't want to go there), not even any morbid pranks with decaying body parts which might have made the whole thing tolerable. This was the man who, after being told life was shit, decided on a whim to climb unarmed into a Weevil cage, and the quality Owen Harper has that made him special over 560 prior stiffs and four idiots amounts to nothing, bar one poxy security code. (Outside of the wonderful Random Shoes there is little competition, but the implication that your career life is worth less to your boss than the information he could write on a post-it note is the single greatest moment of black humour in the programme to date.) Neither Owen's death nor his near-instantaneous resurrection are at all important, it's the subsequent journey that matters; and even with a sociopath of this magnitude who still acts like an utter dork now that he has bottomed out and is literally unfeeling in the worst possible way, if this experience doesn't drastically shake up his entire personality, nothing else on the planet is going to. And even the Weevils are laughing at Owen now, when Jack gets them both carted off to the nick.

Goalpost Head, meet Crossbar Mouth

So you'd think there'd be enough journey material to sustain more than half an episode. Unfortunately, once he's been poked with the sharp stick as a reminder to bung in a bit of danger and alien wazzery, Matt Jones doesn't fill his alloted screentime any better with a single episode than he did with his Impossible Planet / Satan Pit two-parter, which had some good setpieces and nice character moments, but otherwise was a virtual retread of Pyramids Of Mars but with Sutekh and his release almost the entirety of the plot. Dead Man Walking has much the same problem - there's not enough to it and it's almost like watching the pretentiously shambolic Day One again, gas cloud and all - and without an alien planet, a hefty budget or a few pitched gun battles to sustain it, the later half is one big boring 'meh'. The visuals mirror the script for much of the time, lurching ungainly from each focal point to the next, usually with a long period of 'what now' sitting around in between, and far too often taking up a tiny portion of the available great open set space, bringing to the fore the pervading feel of emptiness. So the story just washes over you, leaving you to muse upon little irrelevant things instead; Owen may have lost his gag reflex, but I bet Tosh hasn't after that snog attack if his lips and tongue are cold. Even the gross-out black comedy in the prison cell and the Addams Family glove's unintentionally funny facehugger impresssions can only liven things up so much.

But look kids, it's Hedorah the Smog Monster! Yes, it's time for another arbitrary 'surprise' appearance by an extra-dimensional end-of-level boss we've never heard of before and more than likely never will again, of the sort they never bother to think through properly. This one needs a Baker's dozen (sadly not the good one with the scarf) of human souls to achieve Real Ultimate Ninja Power. Any thirteen will do apparently, which comes to roughly 0.0000002 percent of the current population of over six billion. And it couldn't even manage that the last time it manifested in plague-torn Wales, until clobbered by a corny religious metaphor about faith (and I bet you all groaned at the seeming certainty of it being dusted it off again for the climax). They actually managed to make the Grim Reaper, the single most feared symbol in the history of human expression, rubbish. What is the matter with this series that it has to make its entire plethora of unkillable omnipotent deites so unfathomably wick in order to contrive them into their respective episodes? Banished to limbo with your only hope of release a trenchcoated woofter with a Tarot fetish? If Sutekh could move, he'd be pulling faces under that mask.

They actually managed to make the Grim Reaper, the single most feared symbol in the history of human expression, rubbish

Durok was such an unthreatening presence that I couldn't have cared less about who would survive the tete-a-tete at the end, no matter what the incidental music was desperately trying to tell me. The fight was so static and badly staged that I wasn't watching Death; I was 'looking at' the CGI placement guy with the ball on his head, against whom Burn Gorman was doing such a rotten job of acting towards. Mortal Kombat it wasn't. Perhaps it was also the fact that a hospital isn't the most intelligent place to stage a life-or-death battle for survival when half the victims are on the critical list and unlikely to make it anyway. Smith and Jones leaves this third act in the dirt; it's not anywhere near as exciting or scary as it thinks it is, and with the indestructible man and the walking corpse in the middle of it all, it never feels as though there's any personal stakes involved apart from Martha's (even as a pickled prune she outclasses them all), making Jack's immortality speech in the cell about not having anything to lose jarringly prescient now. Owen finding the will to un-live from a cancer patient with a PSP is as insulting a character manipulation gesture as any the show has deemed fit to beat us over the head with. Besides, there's always the option of pulling an Eldrad and walking into a nuclear furnace, so you might as well knock it off with the self-pity anyway.

And suddenly, finally, everyone's exhausted their ideas and they dither about without any clue where to go next - cast, crew, writers, the lot. To go with the premise explored in the first act, this sort of non-ending would be conceptually perfect if the total lack of overall substance didn't leave it resembling a Spike Milligan sketch where the cast abruptly runs out of material and shambles zombie-like towards the camera chanting "what are we going to do now?" over and over again. It's like a deliberate metaphor for season one. You might almost call it 'postmodern', if postmodernism wasn't unbearable media wankspeak for 'get your own fucking ideas'.

Next: A Day In The Death. This time last season, the grand majority were hoping for one giant final clashing chord as the SERIES ENDED.

February 24, 2008

One look at that cheery face and bubbly personality and all the fond memories come flooding back. The strings pulled to get her into UNIT. That platonic crush on the Doctor. Handsome men swooning over her wherever she goes. The personal involvement in trendy public concerns of the day. Making a total hash of the very first spying mission she barges her way into. Getting locked up, escaping and immediately recaptured again. I am of course talking about Jo Grant, whom they brought back to write this episode. It's the only way to rationalise all of the above with the complete botch-up of GCSE biology on show today.

Just for openers we're asked to accept that one sunny-side-up injection of Mayfly eggs will retroactively heal anything - ANYTHING - that could conceivably endanger a host organism of any kind. Cancer? Doddle. AIDS? Piece of piss. Mad moo malady? Two fingers and a bright green 9,999 to that one too. Ebola? They'll stick their fingers down its throat, make it cough up all the flesh it's eaten and then beat the virus over the head with it, so there. Chula nanogenes? Ponces, the lot of 'em. You name it, these little winged commandos can restore any living being to its full absolute pinnacle of health. Dan da da daaaahhhh. Buy all the playsets and toys.

Chula nanogenes? Ponces, the lot of 'em

So how do they know? Where does this incredible Wirrn-esque ability to absorb any host's genetic pattern, Google up the universal database of every species ever and compare it against what's supposed to be 'normal' for that particular template, come from? Why is the Mayfly a galactic parasite instead of final conclusive proof of Intelligent Design? Because no natural processes of evolution, not even the ones that failed to spot that the Fendahl might have been a bad idea, would EVER have placed this godlike level of instinctive genius inside an utterly inappropriate shell and life cycle without the Devine Creator having strapped them down and applied several dozen cosmic Mickey Finns first.

Not only would the Mayflies have to be pretty unlucky to get lumbered with a host succumbing to cancer or AIDS, it's hardly likely to matter a spit unless the unspecified gestation period is months or even years. What about stepping out in front of a bus? Can they cure this? If you found out you were infected with these things and were going to die a hideous lingering death while your innards were eaten away, wouldn't suicide be the more preferable option first? The zero survival rate could just be a tiiiiiiiiiny little clue. Wouldn't all this magic Curaga laying-on-feelers effort be better spent on developing a body that wasn't so otherwise completely helpless, vulnerable and short-lived? Healing themselves might be a good start. What if they were to infect some one-of-a-kind mutation, like Leonard Betts or Eugene Tooms? Normal flies lay their eggs in decaying fecal matter; these ones create mountains of shit all on their own.

A single Mayfly offspring that stands about as much chance as K-9 And Company of keeping the family tree going

Anyway, the flipside to being so incredibly brainy and hard is that once exposed to the elements, the grown-up Mayfly must have about point oh oh three two picoseconds to find a brand new host for its offspring before it keels over dead from, I dunno, air pollution. Allergy to sunlight. Green kryptonite. Kennyitis. Anything. They can't have been called Mayflies for nuttin'. So with such a limited adult lifespan to show for it, you'd think the species would maximise the number of chances to keep the life cycle going, right?

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnope. It must be titanically boring to be a baby Mayfly, they apparently have nothing else to do but knock hell's bells out of each other in between watching reruns of Fight Club, Survival and The X-Files: Ice until only one winner remains. In short; an adult Mayfly requires canon-defying biological resources to finish up with one single offspring that stands about as much chance as K-9 And Company of prolonging the family tree.

Boooooooooooooooooollocks.

This isn't bloody frog spawn, most of which will be eaten by ducks or dropped down your sister's neck long before they have to worry later about jam jars, straws and the French; nor is it the African Savannah where survival of the fittest actually matters. Even if it were, beyond JR Hartley or whoever the bloody hell it was deciding halfway through that they fancied a big John Hurt gut-bursting scene, what prompted Mayfly development to settle upon this wacky reproductive cycle which ensures that the combined population can never increase, only go catastrophically down? We're talking SERIOUS negative entropy here - this is a selective breeding program of which Mao Tse Tung would have been proud. Is this the best they can do? What was the alternative, eating broken glass? How has the species survived even this long? What's happening to the host body while they happy-slap each other into oblivion, does it think "ooh, he kicked"? And mating, what about that? Is the adult expected to find a partner in that precious time against all the known laws of probability, or does it reproduce asexually, like regular insects categorically don't? If you told a Mayfly to go fuck itself, would it do it? Would it have time?

Seriously, don't start asking questions; you'll never ever stop. It won't take you many seconds either to come to the conclusion that if it weren't for these ridiculous writer-imposed restrictions, no power in the cosmos would be able to stop them rampaging across the entire universe. You remember the old Friz Freleng short where the little buzzing insect munched away the Pink Panther's house in a matter of seconds? That's what a single Mayfly would do. Now imagine a colony with MILLIONS of the buggers. It makes The Invisible Enemy look like the bastion of common sense.

Apart from all that, I lapped Reset up with a big, beaming smile on my ugly mug. I bet half of you were only watching for Martha anyway. Her job is basically to galvanise everyone - she's not even through the door and Jack's flirting, the dirty bastard. Inconceivable as it sounds, Martha is truly a more comfortable fit within the confines of the Hub than she ever was in the TARDIS. Coupled with this, the asides to Doctor Who don't come over awkwardly or forced for a change; they bloody well ought to, given the three-course meal of fanservice being rammed down our throats compared with the more oblique references we usually sup on. Even if it's just for the next couple of weeks while Martha is on board, you can truly believe now that the two shows belong to the same universe. It's all non-stop, goofy, infectious (sorry) fun. Would it be too much to ask for some more of the UNIT backstory, please? I still want to know what Owen did to get himself kicked out. And getting hold of a UNIT cap is easy; the hard part is finding a uniform Nicholas Courtney won't hate.

Getting hold of a UNIT cap is easy; the hard part is finding a uniform Nicholas Courtney won't hate

Could somebody tell me whose idea those strange corpuscular bumper animations were and why they thought it was a good idea to nick the trick from Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law? It's good that we have a show that's not afraid to experiment with its own visual style, but this is the one directorial touch that absolutely doesn't work this week (Ashley Way seemed to think so too as they noticably disappear about halfway through). It's like a 'MEANWHILE...' or 'LATER...' caption box in a comic; it serves no function except to break apart two individual scenes, and thereby forcibly remind the viewer that the whole world on show is made up. Mat Irvine - the same model maker with no dignity who gimbaled his way through the Weird Science DVD feature with the barely-animated Professor Karensky that fell into his own time accelerator and had to be hung up on wires - states in the Warriors On The Cheap commentary that however flamboyant it may be, an effect should always pass by unnoticed as an effect. It's a lesson which Torchwood steadfastly refuses to learn. Quick! To the Jackcave!

Speaking of whom, the Jack Pack, as always, still find the time to indulge in their usual 'Who Can Be The Crappest' contest. If only he'd stop thinking with his cock for more than three seconds at a time, Jack would kick himself for not realising straight away from his own TARDIS-related exposure to all sorts of alien gubbins and background radiation that Martha and her ming-mong midichlorians should have been the very, very last choice on the planet to try and infiltrate some Umbrella-dodgy medical research facility that's going to take blood tests as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Tosh slips back so effortlessly into her trademark Pavlovian cardboard-cutout deer-in-headlights response the moment anyone else mentions love or romance, she'd be a shoe-in for The Manchurian Candidate. Ianto, alas, disqualifies himself with his platonic love for that stun gun. However, Owen fails so hard while simultaneously banishing Neil's worst nightmares about him and Martha to the Nine Netherhells, that it's double-win. And he doesn't half do a good impression of the Cydonian Face on Mars, for a bonus. You know, the one that came to life in the truly tragic season one X-Files episode with all the stock Space Shuttle footage. LOL POWENED.

If we're going to be at all frank though, that last-minute Big Shock Ending is really about as 'shocking' as the average Phoenix Wright denouement if you've been paying any attention whatsoever. Let's leave aside the obvious question of how, after Suzie, anyone could think Owen's death could be anything other than a cheap gimmick, lacking as this series does the back-to-the-wall desperation that characterised Blake's 7. But looking back at the softening of Owen's character, and particularly the complete about-face in Adam coupled with Adam's own Suzie-like Hamlet impressions about the great void, Owen's 'death' has been at least as heavily signposted thus far through season two as Olag "ooh, I'm out of shape" Gan's was in Pressure Point. The problem is not so much the prospect of the show jumping through mandelbrot sets in order to bring him back, but that either they'll succumb to temptation and make him a 'reformed character' from his experience (and how the buggery is that supposed to make any sense?), or just say 'sod it' and replace him with somebody nicer. Either option amounts to a cheap and nasty writing-off of the Owen of the first dozen or so episodes as a dead loss, without in turn giving us any reason why we ought to give a shit. You'd never have believed you'd hear me saying this after Countrycide, but bring him back now, we won't take less.

February 18, 2008

Well, that amnesia pill certainly did its job; five minutes after the episode finished and I couldn't remember for the life of me whether I actually liked it or not. I think I kind of did - more than Out Of Time, but less than Meat or Captain Jack Harkness - but even after a second viewing I'm not sure what to believe.

The ironies of this episode being about unreality and false visions of the past will not be lost on anybody who suffered through season one. The Torchwood gang make a much better impression upon you when they're not being themselves, and the resolution depends upon their willingness to erase the consequences of this week's activities, which we've absolutely derided the show for when it tossed the baby out with the bathwater willy-nilly, time after time. But mainly it's because a cheap piece of 1988 space-sitcom nonsense managed to do almost the exact same thing in greater depth and less time than the slick, glossy 21st century one. Adam was never going to compete with Red Dwarf: Thanks For The Memories on its own level anyway as the older programme was a pastiche (that is, a deliberate one). It starts with the mystery of two missing days and Lister and Cat's broken legs, but completely ridicules the sci-fi side of it - the early series were brilliant at this before it became exactly what it was supposed to satirise in the first place - by revealing the cause to be something relatively mundane, straightforward and stupid, where Lister just for once wanted to do something nice for Rimmer but ends up hurting him more than if he'd actually tried.

Magnus Greel's invisible moving spiders...

So Adam lacks that element of conceptual genius. It scores elsewhere though by being even more bittersweet and cruel - turning Ianto into a serial killer is easily the single most horrible thing suffered by any of the main cast thus far, as he's that close to going looby-loo mental even at the best of times - and so visually batshit-confusing that you can't help but want to know what the hell any of it is really going to mean by the end of it; though yet again (notice a pattern emerging?) some of the bizarre direction doesn't exactly help.

Adam himself possesses little in the way of physical presence or power in his voice. It's nearly a catastrophic flaw, but not for the obvious reasons you probably think. Like those annoying in-and-out jump-zooms that view like Dawg from the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons being continually stopped short by the rope around his kennel, it's the fault of the direction that this is brought to our attention in such a negative way (the lighting and camera both make a concerted effort to paint Adam as somebody dangerous before his first major blunder a couple of minutes in pisses it all down the toilet), when in fact his ability to fade into the background - at least, until his evil side comes out - is the most important attribute of the character as written; so much so, that it highlights the real problem - that without that critical first error and the chain of dominoes it sets off, you've basically got no story.

Tosh goes up seven cup sizes

If we take a look at those glaring 'mistakes' for a minute: cocking up Gwen's engagement and getting tripped up by basic CCTV security are, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb. Adam's third error isn't in failing to recognise Ianto as such a nerd for detail that he'd note down every little occurrence in triplicate, but rather in not destroying the diary evidence when he had the chance once this became apparent - dumb, once again. Succumbing to pleasure and pushing Ianto so far into madness that nobody in the world will buy it (and since it's a person's belief in what they hold to be the truth that determines the success or failure of a lie-detector test, I don't know what Jack was hoping to accomplish with that), is less a lack of self-control than plain cocksure arrogance, especially after handing the hook for Jack's suspicions over to him on a plate to begin with. But if Adam ends up looking so much like he deserves to fail, it's because like the Moonbase Cybermen, there's simply no way he can lose unless he puts his own foot in it. What difference would success have made anyway? There is not a single character flaw present in Adam that one of the others hasn't already displayed in a more gratuitous fashion, even in the superior season two. He's not some megalomaniacal Bond villain, his only concern is survival, and he's right; Torchwood are more comfortable with themselves from his intervention initially. Tosh goes up seven cup sizes. Yes, yes, alright, do I have the right blah de blah; but if not having permission were the only thing you could hold up to Adam's plan as far as doing anything morally 'wrong' was concerned, then Catherine Treganna would have backed herself into a conflict-free narrative corner. Even with this alternative, there is no real moral point made apart from 'don't get caught'.

The episode also skirts perilously close to coming unglued by the overwrought self-help retcon therapy that goes on for a good ten minutes after what appears to be the episode's natural ending as Adam is carted off, when in fact the one-to-one confrontation that follows is the most important bit. Adam is finally undone by his own trump card, the only live-or-die mistake in the entire episode; his belief that Jack's intense suffering from keeping his past subdued would be so great that Jack would never stand up to him. If this had come off as planned, every other screw-up and more besides would simply not have mattered. But it's terribly easy to look this crucial point straight in the face and not see it. Since there is only one way to provide proper closure to the episode, the final 'Last Temptation' sequence - again with the Christ complex - winds up looking all the more extraneous; Jack's memories were buried before Adam came along, they're buried again once he's exorcised, and no matter what Adam does to him in between, the retcon will take it away again for a net overall difference of zero. But if you're sitting there marking time while Jack slouches around the unreal dream-beach from The X-Files: The Sixth Extinction while his damn-dirty-apes face shrieks "oh shit, it's Vengeance On Varos", you've missed the point in a big way.

Even then I still feel ambivalent towards Jack's past. We have plenty of 'new' history to plug gaps with, some of which may even be true. Magnus Greel's invisible moving spiders are a life-changing event. But it doesn't feel like the right information yet, and the writers are all pulling their own Chris Carters to avoid bringing up the two years of erased memories that are the missing key to the Captain Jack that we think we've known for the last three years. Or had you forgotten? They also gave us so much peekaboo into Jack's background that they completely forgot about the one real bloke whose mind didn't get pissed about with. What is he, some malignant parasitic entity inhabiting the void, like the Eternals? And we came in with Adam firmly entrenched in place, but what exactly happened when Torchwood found him, or the other way round? Am I missing something here? Could I be looking for answers that don't matter? Or is it that they failed to answer the most nagging question of all; namely that if Captain Jack's dad was Bruce Willis, how did he turn out so camp?

If Captain Jack's dad was Bruce Willis, how did he turn out so camp?

And I don't think I really wanted to know the team's innermost defining memories, and certainly not as a Freudian cop-out excuse or apology for who they are and what they do, as Owen's emotional abuse as a child was. But not even Adam can cure Owen of being an arsehole, and whether real or imagined, expressing your desire (ineptly) for a colleague on their anniversary is just an arsehole thing to do. The real Owen doesn't do flowers or apologies. He doesn't do feelings very well either. Arnold Rimmer, Dwayne Dibbley, or Bert from Sesame Street with specs on? You decide. And Ianto; yes, I know you were traumatised by Cyberwoman, it was the stupidest episode ever and you were terrible in it, but for God's sake once and for all GET OVER IT. And as for Gwen; well, all she has to do is ask Rhys what happened over the last two days and they're fucked again.

Hmm, what was it you were saying about selective memory loss last week, Neil?

February 11, 2008

You are what you eat.Pat Mills and John Wagner areJust a mite ticked off.

Torchwood: Meat

So these two tossers are having a 'poor man's Cardiff Krays' contest with their wet mate. This huge great wrinkly turd-shaped thing pops out of the sky and lands on their laps. They have no idea what it is, how it got there or where it came from. Which one of them spontaneously decides "I know, let's eat it!", and takes the first bite to establish it as edible? Caaaaaath, The Goodies ended twenty years ago!

Let's get the blindingly obvious out of the way first. The plot, even by this show's meticulous standards, is insane. It requires a farce-theatre level of comic misunderstanding and relies upon Rhys being a total administrative buffoon before it even works at all, and there's no way I'm going to accept for a second that any Quorn-alike this rancid and unearthly is ever going to get past all the health and safety barriers and into the system, no matter what horror stories have been vomited at us in all the newspapers before.

Caaaaaath, The Goodies ended twenty years ago!

Also, you know those big swoopy hydraulic arcade cabinets that used to house games like Afterburner? That's Colin Teague's direction. Somebody hooked up the camera to an R-360 and let it rip - whoosh it goes towards every immediate sound source, wildly overcompensating and having to lurch back every time. And that's in the inactive conversation scenes. I'm convinced now that the only reason they keep Teague on is as a last line of blackmail defense against effects budget cuts, akin to Patrick McGoohan sulking, "Do The Prisoner my way or I'll make the ending unwatchable." Because you can't whip-pan everywhere around a majestic screen-filling CGI behemoth; not that the daft sod wouldn't try if there was any more room to piss about with. The ketamine stopped working at the end because they already wasted it all on the bloody cameraman.

But you know what? I bloody loved it anyway. There is something very '60s Marvel comic' about Meat; Stan Lee, flying in the face of industry-wide, self-imposed creative apathy, proved that a good story doesn't have to be original or even particularly well-written (though this is doing Treganna a massive disservice), so long as it's 'real' on a fundamental gut-level. Rhys completely and utterly won me over here, as every reaction Kai Owen gives - the realistic underplayed shock at his driver's death, the off-the-cuff lines ("Is he gay by any chance?") to mask his overwhelmed fragile grasp of the situation, the simple childlike joy at being alive, marred by the fear of responsibility that could bring it all crashing down at any time - is utterly convincing and genuine. No Neil, it is. Maybe you have just witnessed a giant, shapeless thing being cut up alive in a warehouse. But if you've just twigged that your fiancee has been telling you fairy stories for the last twelve months, are you honestly going to be damned to let her in on what you know, before you finally needle the truth out of her first?

This complaint about Meat being 'heavy-handed'; well, count your blessings as it could have been a lot worse. Denis Leary said, "Eating meat is an instinct; not eating it is a decision." At no point do the butchers believe their prey to be anything more than a lump of protein, but this is just what human beings do, to distance themselves from the food they eat by not putting a face on it. As far as they're concerned, the only thing they're doing wrong is bypassing all the bureaucratic rules; if anything, the 'message' is then undermined by their need to wave their guns around and show us that they're bad people, and to bring the wet one's change of heart - which is as much squeamishness as conscience - into sharp relief. If the bovver bruvvers had sank to their knees in realisation and wailed "WHAT HAVE WE DONE", that would have been heavy-handed. Or Jack spouting "What have they done to you, my poor friend?"... Oh.

But this is missing the point. Take the CGI out of the equation, and you're left with a number of different script elements that don't really need to jockey for position to grab your attention. To The Last Man was deliberately structured as a journey, but the giant space manatee is an incidental catalyst, and the 'humanitarian' aspect of its plight isn't really much more important here beyond a pang of sympathy and guilt, any more than Out Of Time was bothered with the cosmic anomaly that brought the three travellers to Torchwood's door before it all started going to hell for all concerned. You're not really expected to empathise with this thing, as the script makes it clear through the human protagonists how difficult this is, and Jack is fundamentally larger-than-life different from us anyway. (Jack's quip on eating alien meat would have been worth an extra fifty points alone if it had been a genuine Dish Of The Day reference; alas, we know from Rhys' Foon van Hoff secretary that he really will hit on absolutely anything with a hole and a heartbeat, and the chamber cut into the beast that's great for doing Pinocchio impressions with still probably isn't large enough.)

No, if anyone's going to have a beef (pun not intended) with the episode's politics, it's going to be over Catherine Treganna's apparent thing for euthanasia, though Owen administers the lethal dosage in a more pragmatic fashion this time. Personally, I love the way she makes us squirm with this, as there are no easy answers, no bullshit cop-out solutions, that it's an alien space-cow instead of a human being ultimately makes no principle difference (and if it had, something would have gone badly wrong with the production somewhere), everyone ends up hating themselves for what they have to do, and in that way showing us once again why they're so fundamentally bad at their jobs. The creature is dead, and the 'baddies' have basically got away scot-free in a way that leaves Voyage Of The Damned's 'that would make you a monster' moment looking particularly vapid.

Ianto: he's back, and this time he's got an erection

Mainly though, Meat is about the awkwardness of human relationships, this being the one area in particular where Catherine Treganna is absolutely head and shoulders above the rest of the scriptwriting meat-puppets; the two-way incompatibilities here play out in a resonating way, rather than being stilted and forced as Tommy and Tosh were in To The Last Man. It's about recognising when things have gone too far and knowing when to quit or come clean instead of hanging on grimly like Wile E. Coyote. It's about loyalty ultimately winning out over common sense. But most of all, it's about Rhys' wonder at his exposure to a new world. If Gwen had actually stolen that uplifting humanity at the end with the retcon pill, that would have all but killed the series' potential for character development for me right then and there, as an admission that it either simply can't be bothered, or isn't prepared to take risks; and her impassioned speech about Rhys being a 'better man' for involving himself voluntarily, instead of out of any sense of 'job duty' which deep down Torchwood all know is a crock of shit, is this season's true punch-the-air moment for me thus far.

It hasn't quite come off before now, but this is what season two has been leading up to; a self-assuredness that almost makes you wish that season one could be retconned out of existence altogether, even if it means losing Eugene and Captain Jack Harkness. It's going to take more episodes of this standard before we can finally throw off the instinct to shout 'no' every time Ianto throws a one-liner or does something totally pissed-off cool (he's back, and this time he's got an erection), or Owen is genuinely nice, because it's so out of character with what's gone before. It's a bit like watching a film made by a couple of media student friends as part of their final thesis; they really want an honest critique from you, but you can't quite get over the hurdle of them being your own pathetic mates.

But has anyone advocating the nationwide mass-application of Retcon stopped to consider the minor side-effect of it driving people bananas?